: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

sat there in the darkness of that early morning. A Sunday. The tenth of December.

Outside the lieutenant’s tent a few men stirred, mess cooks mostly, those already building up the fires to boil coffee and beginning to wrassle up breakfast for the various companies. But for the most part the troopers and their horses were quiet in the cold of this last hour before sunrise.

It looks to be we’ll be here awhile. Crook’s waiting for supplies to come up from Fetterman. We were supposed to have them before now, but someone else ended up with them. So here the army sits. At least until the supplies come and Crook and Mackenzie can go off on the march again.

He sipped at the coffee going cold in the tin cup at his elbow, then flung the lukewarm dregs at the foot of the canvas tent flap where it would soon turn to ice.

How was he going to keep from telling her, without lying to her?

But there wasn’t a damn bit of good sense in telling her what he would soon be about, where he was going, and what he would be facing. No good sense at all. But, he reminded himself, how to keep from saying anything without it being less than the truth?

It promised to fair off this day. To warm above zero. And the wind had yet to come up. Perhaps it was a good omen, this day starting off so fair. They were about due, he thought. What with all those cold days in hell they’d suffered already.

Don’t fear that I’ll grow bored here, Sam. Crook and Mackenzie will see to that. They’ve got scouts going out in this direction or the other all the time. Coming and going. And they plan on having me out too. While we are waiting here for rations and grain for the horses, the generals want to know what the Indians are doing. Where Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are camped, or moving. So the Indian scouts are being sent north toward the Yellowstone, into the Powder River country. It’s there the Indian scouts say Crazy Horse and his warriors have gone.

In a matter of moments he would be mounting up with the Indian scouts and they would be pointing their noses a little west of north. As soon as he had wolfed down his breakfast, washing it all down with some more of that scalding coffee.

He could hear the sound of horses being brought close. It could be Three Bears and some of his men—the ones who would accompany him half the way to the Yellowstone. At least to the mouth of the Little Powder.

So at least I have something to do from day to day. Able to saddle up and ride out rather than hang about camp here with the soldiers, playing cards with no money, fighting, sleeping, and otherwise getting on one another’s backs. I’d rather be out on the back of a good, strong horse that doesn’t talk back. Where it’s quiet enough to hear my own thoughts.

Where I can think about you. And our boy.

I promised you I’d return soon, back to your arms. And once I’m back at your side, I promised I would be ready to name our first born. In the weeks since we parted, I have given thought to this matter, weighing my choices from your family and mine. And while I haven’t yet decided, I am near to making a decision.

Just as I promised you—our son will have a name by the time I return to you both.

Shall we have him christened at that time? There with the chaplain at the Laramie post? I am certain that is what we should do as soon as we have given him his Christian name. To stand at your side, holding him in my arms as he is blessed, and we are blessed with him.

The cook just stuck his head in and told me my breakfast was out of the kettle and on the plate. It will freeze soon if I don’t eat it right away. And I’m ready for another cup of his dreadful coffee. It will be light soon and time to go to work for the army. For Crook and Mackenzie and the Powder River Expedition. To mount up and ride out.

It gives my mind a lot of time to think, and my heart a lot of time to ache, Sam. Missing you both more than I ever dreamed I could miss anything or anyone. But we both know I have a job to do while I’m here. There aren’t many things I have the talent to do. I am a simple man with big, clumsy hands and a half-slow brain, but I can do army work. If this is how God wills me to put the food on my family’s table, to put the clothes on your backs and a roof over your heads, then so be it.

I will always do what God sets before me, to the best of my ability—for there are those who are counting on me to see my way through all trouble and travail thrown down in my path, for there are those who are counting on me to make my way back home to them. Soon.

Know that I will do all that is within my power to be back beside you by Christmas, our son’s first. If for some reason the army keeps me here in this far north country longer than that—I vow to do all I can to be home shortly after the coming of the new year.

Keep me in your prayers, Sam. Hold our son close morning and night for me too. Oh, that I could wrap you both in my arms right now, it is so cold here. So very, very cold here. For the love of God, please pray for me—pray that God will hold me in his hand and deliver me to you soon.

And remember what I’ve always told you. That God watches over drunks, and fools, and poor army wretches like me. I’m coming home soon, Sam. Watch the skyline to the north. One day I’ll be there, big as life, come home to hold you both again.

Until then, hug yourselves for me. And tell my son that his father loves him more than breath itself. Know that I love and cherish you more, much, much more than I do my own life.

Seamus

* Just above the site of present-day Ashland, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.

† Present-day Beaver Creek.

Afterword

As promised in the afterword of Trumpet on the Land, at the very beginning of A Cold Day in Hell I’ve taken the luxury of moseying back in time a bit toward the story we covered at the end of that earlier novel, by having Frank Grouard relate his little-known private horse race with the poet scout, “Captain” Jack Crawford who had likewise accompanied George Crook’s army through Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota Territory.

I was able to draw this exciting and ofttimes silly tale not only from the memoirs left by Frank Grouard and Jack Crawford themselves, but from Captain Andrew S. Burt as well. From his account we learn that James Gordon Bennett, wealthy publisher of the New York Herald, not only paid Crawford the $500 promised him by the grouchy news correspondent Reuben Davenport, but another $225—in payment for “horses killed and expenses.”

After speaking to General Sheridan at Laramie, Crawford returned to Custer City in the Black Hills, where he learned he had been discharged as a scout for slipping away without notice at Crook City. Quartermaster records, in fact, show that he was relieved of duty on 15 September. He may well have spent the month of October among his old haunts, enjoying his notoriety among the prospectors and merchants of the Black Hills.

But by the second week of November he was in Omaha, on his way to Philadelphia, where he joined up with Buffalo Bill’s newly reinstated production of a western melodrama. In the next few months Crawford “discovered that his talents for entertaining extended beyond the glow of an evening campfire.” After the successful spring season of 1877, he broke with Cody and formed his own theatrical company.

In the years to come we will find the Irish-born “poet scout” relating many of his exploits in the form of rhyme and verse before Chautauqua audiences and upon many other lecture platforms. But he will reemerge in the future, for he served as a scout during the Apache warfare in the Southwest, at the conclusion of which he established a ranch on the Rio Grande where Crawford would live until his death in 1917, living each day according to the personal philosophy he oft times recited:

I never like to see a man